The same could not be said of west Africa. In 1981 Equatorial Guinea had rebuffed the Soviet Union's attempts to reinforce its footholds there and had, moreover, invited the country's former colonizers, Spain, to return and help with the re-organization of the army, the economy and constitution. The USSR had suffered comparable setbacks in two former Portuguese colonies, Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands. France, meanwhile, felt able to swallow some of its socialist-inspired disapproval for the more despotic behaviour of dictatorships in French-speaking west Africa and pledged continued military and economic assistance to the Ivory Coast and the Central African Republic. Perhaps the most encouraging developments of all had been those in the western Sahara. The withdrawal of Libyan aid to the Polisario, continued Saudi Arabian economic props for Morocco, and the OAU's refusal to recognize the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic, all made for compromise, and a solution was at last agreed during 1983 between Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, and the Polisario itself. The idea of a separate and independent Saharan state was abandoned, or at any rate postponed. Instead, federation with Mauritania of much of the disputed territory won the day.
Nigeria and Zaire were two other countries in Africa where Western anxiety for moderation and cohesion did much to reconcile them to the necessary price that had to be paid — substantial foreign loans to these countries. Nigeria's problem was one of reduced oil exports and thus revenues. This made the import of sufficient food, which constituted more than half of all imports, very difficult. A reduction in imports had in the past inflated prices disastrously. It was essential for the civilian government's success in the 1983 elections that there should be neither food shortages nor crises over prices. Its broad programme for alleviating these difficulties was a conventional one — cuts in government spending, delay in satisfying creditors abroad, general austerity in federal and state allowances, abandonment of new projects. These measures alone were not sufficient, but combined with sensible progress towards a sound oil policy and proper loan guarantees they did much to make possible the necessary borrowing on the international market.
Zaire's political instability arose not only from the need for international monetary credit — indeed this need had been temporarily taken care of by the enormous IMF grant of $1 billion spread over three years. It had arisen from dissatisfaction with the former President's tyrannical methods and his inability to cure the unrest in Shaba and, worse, in Kivu where the Parti Revolutionnaire Populaire pursued its guerrilla campaign against central authority. The new President, however, was able to reassure both the President of France and Belgium's Prime Minister to the extent that they felt able to cooperate more fully both militarily and economically.
Thus, as the United States and the Soviet Union moved towards war during the latter part of 1984 and the early months of 1985, the greatest danger of this war's being waged by proxy in Africa was not in the Arab countries of the north-east, nor in the Sahara, nor west Africa, not even in the relatively stable centre and east. It was in the Horn of Africa and in the south. In the event, as we saw in chapter 17, the Horn of Africa was partly neutralized by the astonishing speed and force with which the United States and its allies strengthened their position in Egypt, the Red Sea and the Gulf. South Yemen was contained by naval action, and by powerful deterrence from North Yemen and Oman. In a similar way Ethiopia was contained by United States military reinforcement of Somalia and Sudan. The fighting in southern Africa, however, was prolonged and savage. It has been described in some detail in a previous book[24] and it is not intended to reiterate here either an account of the military operations or of the gradual withdrawal of black African forces and ANC guerrillas from South Africa. Nor need we concern ourselves with the immense United Nations activities which dealt with the problems of relief, reconstruction and repatriation, although it should be noted that the Cubans, the East Germans and what remained of the Soviet advisers were repatriated, in many cases after lengthy hospitality from South African 'camps' which made the treatment they were subjected to by their own countrymen, when they did return, less disagreeable than it might otherwise have been. What does command our attention now is the effect that war in southern Africa had on the central problem itself- the future of the Republic of South Africa.
One result of the brief but cataclysmic war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO was that it prolonged, with results whose severity and disruption have yet fully to be seen, the unjust and oppressive regime based on white supremacy in South Africa. It seemed that during the early days of recovery from this last world war, South Africa's leaders — faced with all the pressures for and against reform, some internal, some external — chose to risk the mounting black discontent and violence for the sake of white control. When war came, the activities of the front-line states' armies, together with ANC guerrillas, did little to endear the Afrikaners to their northern neighbours, except in so far that the South African Defence Force's eventual successes in holding on and beating back all invaders strengthened conviction in their own supremacy. Indeed the poor showing of the ANC guerrillas when it came to actual battle reinforced the views of hard-line Afrikaner leaders that they would be able to perpetuate their own political dominance. White control was something they understood and thought they knew how to deal with. The consequences of a programme of reform and reconstruction were not understood and were as a result feared and shunned. There had been ample grounds for misgiving even before the war began. In Namibia constitutional government had been overthrown in 1985 — and SWAPO dictatorship established. In Zimbabwe gradual decline from democratic practices had been more or less completed in the same year; Botswana's greatly enhanced support for both foreign and ANC revolutionary militants had simply ensured the misery of its own people; and Mozambique had seemed helpless in trying to escape from the contradictory grips of communist mercenaries and national resistance movements.
There may have been one or two unexpected dividends in South Africa for those who advocated a policy of gradual reform and power-sharing. One was the revulsion felt by black and white South Africans alike at the indiscriminate bloodlust shown by some of the ANC guerrillas during the transitory and haphazard instances when unarmed civilians were at their mercy. Another was the stand taken by black homeland units, like the Transkeian Defence Force, the Bophuthatswana National Guard and, most notably, by the Inkhata Army, which so furiously and successfully resisted the Cuban and Mozambique attempts to invade the Zulu homelands. Yet examples like this of loyalty to the Republic did little or nothing to reconcile those who had previously questioned the principle of liberal reform to a new initiative for a verligte policy. On the contrary, there was an even greater swing to the verkrampte line advocating the exploitation of South Africa's economic hold in terms of food, transport, technology and goods, over its neighbouring black countries, so creating a kind of buffer between white supremacy and the ANC, and abandoning the reformist schemes that had raised so much hope in the early 1980s.